Learning curves: Often I am asked questions about the length of time that will be required to achieve proficiency in jiu jitsu. An interesting corollary to this question is of great importance to many of the professional athletes that I teach – if I am to compete against an opponent who has trained far longer than me, how can I ever hope to catch up to his level, given the disparity in total training time? On the face of it, it seems impossible. If athlete A has been training 20 hours per week for ten years and athlete B has been training 20 hours a week for 5 years and A and B are of similar size and body type, it would seem that B ought to have little chance of success. It is my belief that this is not the case. Once an athlete has a strong foundation of the basic movements and concepts in the sport, there can be radical differences in learning curves that can allow for seemingly miraculous acts of catch up where athletes with significantly less total training time can do very well against more experienced opponents. The most important factor in an athletes training background is NOT length of time training, but rather rate and sustenance of performance improvement. Most coaches and teams simply teach students the same way they were taught themselves, with no thought for improving transmission of knowledge. As a result, many training programs cease being effective in continuing to build new skills after a certain point. Athletes go into skill stagnation and are more or less the same at ten years as they were at five. An interesting test of my beliefs occurred when my student eddie cummings competed in EBI championships. He knew he was slated to fight the outstanding veteran grappler, Baret Yoshida, who had competed very successfully at the highest levels for well over a decade. Understandably, Mr Cummings was worried that his total training time of only just over five years would not fare well against the highly skilled Mr Yoshida, who had been doing jiu jitsu three times longer than that. Yet on the night, Mr Cummings won with relatively little trouble despite having only a third of his opponent's total training time – a gratifying vindication of our program.
